BIGGEST Oriole question mark—ailing stopper
Laird Dealie's elbow woes—was answered in the negative Friday,
perhaps for good, in the first inning of Dealie's first outing since his
injury-plagued left bursal sac went under the knife for the third time,
last May. "I had command, I had location, but then I tried to waste an 0-2
splitter in the dirt and heard a noise like linoleum ripping," Dealie told
reporters. How did it feel? "I just thought, 'Here we go again.'"

When he heard the noise? "No, just now, when you asked me how it felt. Go tear
your elbow out and put it into words."

Postgame the formerly dominant lefty underwent a fourth bout of reconstructive
surgery on the troubled joint, which was rebuilt using cartilage from his ears
and a ligament from the ankle of pitching coach Mel Pehr. "Next year I'm going
wire to wire," vows Dealie. "And part of me'll be there with him," quips Pehr.
We'll see.

* Emanuel Vesto is just two bases shy of becoming the 138th man in history to
reach the 300-pilfer milestone, but contract-extension hassles have left him
reluctant to slide: "These legs put my children's food on the table. Why should
my family have to be insecure about what I'll be making in 2002? It's affecting
my intensity level." Current $53.5-mill pact expires just after the
millennium.

* Mets have farmed set-upper Chad DeSisto to Single-A St. Lucie. "We were
pleased with his mechanics," says a front-office source, "and he had a lot of
presence on the mound—plus you couldn't measure the intangibles he
potentially gave us. But he had lost two inches off his velocity."

* Both pitchers' and hitters' unions are closely following progress of suit
filed by Tito Jolly to redefine a quality start, in light of run inflation, as
five innings giving up fewer than five ER. Jolly's pact calls for bonus of
$55,000 per quality start. Any trend toward adjustment for inflation is likely
to be opposed by hitters, concerned their own incentives might be
jeopardized.

* TOUCHY, TOUCHY: His battle back from experimental groin surgery is something
Harkey Pollum refuses to discuss with the press, despite reported movie
interest. Groin is still nagging, teammates confide, but Pollum was mum
Thursday after consulting with groin specialist Dr. Shane Ng on the heels of
four straight whiffs against Indians.

* Looks like, barring tragic injury, The Force will be with us for a while.
Eyeing the arc of Rollie Wilt's 3-0 cripple picked on by slugging phenom Wilton
"The Force" Coursey, a press-box wag shook his head over the mammoth smash and
wondered aloud, "Ruth? Aaron?"

Came back the quip, "People to compare him to, or books in the Bible?"

To which was rejoined, "Aaron's not a book, he's Moses' brother."

"We will be too, by the time that clout comes down," was the
re-rejoinder.

Speaking of biblical Aaron, he turned rod into serpent and caused it to bud,
blossom, and bear almonds—everything but make contact with
horsehide. That's about what Tintin Coates did to Dodger lumber in 2-0 whitewash Wednesday. "He threw us more knucklers than we could shake a stick at," sighed L.A.'s Bobby "Chef" Boyardy. But they tried.

* That frayed rotator-cuff fringe revealed in his last MRI has not kept Duwane
Tice from spending off days speaking to junior high schools about the perils of
nondeferred compensation: "If I can save even one kid from confiscatory
taxation, it'll be worth it."

* QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "Anything I have to say to that [expletive expletive] I'll
say to his face. I don't need to send that [expletive expletive] messages
through the media"—Herc Kibble after Astro RHP Tarlton Pye was
quoted as
calling him an [expletive].

* OKAY, WHATEVER: In the wake of rumors about his suspect left foot, Red IF/OF
Job Sootlich snapped, "It feels like barbed arrows of hellfire running back and
forth from the [hyperextended] subtarsal pad to the [further torn] plantar
fascia. A foot is a personal thing. My mother kissed my feet when I was a
little child. I stood on these feet when I was married. My foot is not in my
own hands—all I can do is try to do a good job exemplifying Jesus
Christ." Hey, Job, how about this: "sooties" is what Elvis and mom called
their feet.

* What began simply as a flyer last spring has matured into full-fledged
reality: Tojo Colon, who had the best raw tools of any 2B under twenty-seven
but couldn't budge ironman keystoner Flea Armiento from his slot, has found
himself at the hot corner. "He always had that gun and those soft hands," says
Sox scout Doggie Schepp, "and now he's proving acclimated around the other
bag."

* Old Anaheim hand Cleve Trinidad, toiling under his ninth career skipper,
likes the clubhouse atmosphere since new helmsman Solly Mele took over Angels'
reins. "We've got that looseness mentality, so guys are tight enough to get on
guys without the personal vendettas. We're not dead like we were." They still
trail A's by twelve.

* NO MORE GERBILS FOR INDIANS: After Quilvio Hein was hobbled by a rib-cage
strain resulting from mishap experienced while assembling his son's gerbil
environment, Tribe front office issued clarification of contract provisions
regarding pets. "With just 'potentially hazardous animals' it was left too wide
open for interpretation," said GM Mel Orny.

* Bouncing courageously back from removal of scar tissue formed after
ulnar-nerve surgery, Joaquin Pez is handling the bat with authority, spraying
it around with pop. "My shoulder's made super strides," he says. "Now, if trade
rumors would only stop swirling around me." Word around the league is, little
does he know.

* In a dizzying ending to a bizarre season-long story line, Detroit abruptly
ended prolonged off-and-on contract-restructuring negotiations with agent Deke
"Quickie" Norway on learning that Norway did not actually represent any player.
"He talked a good game," said a red-faced Tiger exec. One more major disaster
for a front office that shot itself in the foot big time on the Ferret-Morganza
deal and has a massive void of talent to show for it.

* SHORT HOPS: It's "agony and ecstasy" time in Cleveland ... After
Dome was
fumigated for fruit flies, LHP Dody Ilster fanned a career-high eleven over
five and two thirds ... Mel Grobel's shoulder is so bad he can't get
on top
to snap off his slider ... Can we say Mariner submariner Lumar Varcy has
taken his game to another level? ... Blanked for six innings by Darrin
Badger's offerings, Royals demanded his elbow be x-rayed for foreign substance,
but the much-whittled joint checked out at over 60 percent organic. "They were
just trying to throw me off my rhythm," said Badger ... Cope Wigbe's
strained
left rib cage sent a shudder through the whole Brewers organization --
which breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Big Ticket rebounded
with no long-term implications ... Insiders fear Evangelisto Crispo's
looming trials for substance possession, false imprisonment, and menacing
of a female relative can't help but affect him mentally at the
plate ... Talk about hair-trigger men in blue: Kelso Outlar turned to
vet arbiter Rollie Babondi the other night at Wrigley after a close strike
call and said, "Wha ... ?" "Watch it," said Babondi. "I'll
run you." "For saying 'Wha ... ?'" demanded Outlar,
open-mouthed. Rollie ran him ... Addition of Jansen "Mr. Ed" Orengo,
no longer hobbled by shoulder-fluid buildup, to the already arm-rich Expo
staff creates a rotation dilemma, but "that's the kind of dilemma you like
to have," says new director of player personnel Pooh Lupis ... Tuesday
night Adrian Cherney became first Giant hurler since the Second World War
to cry openly on the mound ... When the Yanks' Olen Linker blooped
meekly to short Monday, it marked his first soft liner of the
campaign ... Sushi Inoko surrendered two free passes to Orioles
Thursday, breaking a skein of ten walkless starts ... The next Trout
rumor you hear may be Atlanta ... What put kibosh on much-rumored
three-way deal with Twins? Padres', Bluejays' inability to see eye to
eye ... Inflamed Achilles forced Donnie Poppe to sit during the Cards'
western swing ... Yes, that was Hibbett Wangel in another bizarre
incident ... Cedric Smallwood, filling in for Coby Deplane (groin
damage) in center till Lejermian Tyle's promising glove could be summoned
from Triple-A Buffalo, muffed routine fly against Rangers, prompting a
press-box wag to crack, "Must've been something E-8" ... Last year it
was southpaws. This year, righties. What to make of it? "These things,"
says Tulsa GM Ping Leggio, "go in cycles."

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.